Straits of Power cjf-5

by Joe Buff

  On his latest missions the stakes had been as high as they could come, possibly shaping the outcome of the whole war. But this last time, it appeared, Jeffrey had gone too far in some ways, and not far enough in others. He suspected there were whispers in the corridors of the Pentagon that he was an uncontrollable cowboy, a loose cannon who second-guessed others too much — and when it mattered most, his jealous rivals would be saying, he’d shown a streak of cowardice. Jeffrey knew he’d done the right thing at every stage of that mind-twisting mission, but what he knew inside didn’t count. He was on his way into professional obscurity, dead-ended at the rank of commander, bound for some desk job far from the action. His own worst nightmare was coming true: He was being beached, before the war had even been won.

  He listened to the steady rushing sound that came from the air-circulation vents in the overhead of his cabin. The air inside the forward parts of Challenger was always cool, to keep the electronics from overheating. Jeffrey was very used to it, but this evening for some strange reason he felt chilled into his marrow. Then he understood.

  The cycle of death-defying adrenaline rushes, followed by high-level awards and attention, had for him become addictive. Jeffrey was experiencing the symptoms of withdrawal, leaving him utterly empty inside.

  He looked up for a moment at the bluish glare of the fluorescent fixtures, like plant grow-lights to keep submariners healthy while deprived of any sun for weeks on end. He glanced at the grayish flame-proof linoleum squares that covered his stateroom deck, then gazed around at the fakewood wainscot veneer, and bright stainless steel, lining the four bulkheads of his tiny world. He pulled a standard-issue brown sweater out of a clothing drawer, one made of wool with vertical ribbing, putting it on over the khaki uniform blouse and slacks he always liked to wear while under way. He was still cold.

  Outside his shut door, in the narrow passage, he heard crewmen hurrying about now and then, on their way to different stations to perform the myriad tasks that helped the ship run smoothly every second of every minute of every single day. There was no margin for error on a nuclear submarine. Jeffrey dearly loved this endless pressure, much as he’d grown accustomed to the constant, potentially killing squeeze of the ocean surrounding Challenger.

  He sighed. Too soon another man would sit at this little fold-down desk, sleep in this austere rack, put up photos of wife and children, and assert his own personality and habits onto the crew. Challenger would have a different captain, because Jeffrey’s run of luck as captain had finally run out.

  Someone knocked.

  “Come in!” Jeffrey welcomed any distraction.

  His executive officer entered, Lieutenant Commander Jackson Jefferson Bell. A few inches taller than Jeffrey, but less naturally muscular, Bell was happily married and had a six-month-old son to look forward to seeing again, once they arrived in the States. Cautious in his tactical thinking when Jeffrey was super-aggressive, Bell complemented Jeffrey perfectly in the control room during combat. Often he’d played devil’s advocate in engagements where split seconds mattered, when the waters thundered outside the hull and Challenger shook from stem to stern as if tossed by an angry sea monster — and Jeffrey’s crew looked to him to somehow, some way, keep them alive, while an Axis skipper did his damnedest to smash their ship to pieces and slaughter every person aboard.

  Right now Bell seemed uncomfortable, as if he could tell that their prior working relationship would end soon. Comings and goings, joinings and separations, were a normal enough part of life in the Navy. This time, though, it was different. Jeffrey and Bell’s parting would not be a happy one for Jeffrey, and he knew he’d miss Bell a lot. Their hair’s-breadth survival so many times, the shared exhilaration with each added victory, had brought the two men close.

  Jeffrey grimaced to himself. Bell will have a new boss.

  Jeffrey understood Bell’s perspective. He needed to attend, first and foremost, to his own future career. Bell had a family to support. If he survived the war and wanted to stay in the Navy, he’d require as much space between himself and Jeffrey’s now-tainted reputation as he could get.

  Bell had arrived to give his regular evening 2000—8 p.m. — report as XO to his captain. Bell’s words held no surprises. He wrapped up crisply and left, pulling the door shut behind him. Toward the end of his verbal update on the status of the ship and her machinery and equipment and personnel, Bell avoided making eye contact. It was as if he was embarrassed for Jeffrey, and tried to hide it, but the more he tried to hide it, the more he made things worse.

  Two more weeks of this before they got to New London, Jeffrey told himself. He was a lame duck in every sense of the word. He didn’t like the sensation, not one bit.

  At least they didn’t relieve me of command right there at Pearl. Probably only because nobody with the right credentials was free.

  Jeffrey needed something more than meaningless paperwork to keep busy. He refused to start mental rehearsals for the court martial which might be coming — that was just too defeatist, too morbid. There’d be plenty of time for it later if need be, and as a decorated war hero — a national celebrity— such drastic measures were unlikely. No, exile to semioblivion in some token land activity was a more probable disposition for a commander who’d become an awkward case to those on high, key officials not just at the Pentagon but in the CIA and the State Department too, coming together at the Cabinet level.

  Jeffrey realized his thoughts were going in circles.

  To stay occupied, however briefly, and hear the sound of another human voice, Jeffrey picked up his intercom handset for the control room. The messenger of the watch answered, one of the youngest and least experienced crewmen, someone who was still working hard to earn his silver dolphins, the coveted badge of a full-fledged enlisted submariner; officers wore gold. Jeffrey wondered if the messenger, like Bell, would survive this horrendous war or not — assuming civilization and humanity survived.

  “Give me the Navigator, please,” Jeffrey said, keeping his tone as even as he could.

  “Wait one, sir,” the still-boyish voice of the teenage messenger said.

  “Navigator here, Captain,” Jeffrey heard in his earpiece. Despite himself, he smiled. Lieutenant Richard Sessions was one of the most unflappable people he’d ever met, inside or outside the military. From a small town in Nebraska, Sessions was the type of guy whose hair and clothes were always a little sloppy, no matter what he did. But his indispensable work as head of the ship’s navigating department — an extremely technical area — was without fail beautifully organized and precise.

  “Nav, when do we pass through fifty-five north, onehundred-seventy-five west?” In mid-Bering Sea, on the way up to the strait. It was at that point, and only then, that Jeffrey was to open the sealed orders in his safe, containing the recognition signals and other data he’d need to finish his last trip without becoming a victim of friendly fire.

  “Hold please, sir,” Sessions responded, as earnest as ever.

  At her present stealthy speed of twenty knots, and heading due north, Challenger would cross one degree of latitude every three hours. Jeffrey had a detailed readout on the computer screen by his desk, so he always knew the ship’s exact position to an error usually measured in tens of feet — depth was displayed to the nearest foot. He could have done the calculation easily in his head. Calling Sessions was make-work, for both of them. And it wasn’t like anyone would know or care if he opened those orders an hour early or late.

  But punctuality was valued — and demanded — in the Navy. It had been thoroughly ingrained in Jeffrey from the time, almost twenty years ago, when he’d done college in Navy ROTC at Purdue, an electrical engineering major. Now, in his late thirties, even in the midst of emotional doldrums, the impulse to stick to a printed schedule died hard.

  Sessions had the answer for Jeffrey quickly. “At local time zero-three-twenty tomorrow, sir.” The wee hours of the coming morning.

  “Okay. Thanks, Nav.” Jeffrey
hung up.

  Aw, what the heck.

  As an act of rebellion against those seniors who’d used him, drained him, and cast him aside when the going got rough, Jeffrey stood and opened his safe.

  He withdrew the bulky envelope. It contained a seawaterproof incendiary self-destruct charge, to cremate the classified contents in case of unauthorized tampering. This precaution was normal for submarine captains’ order pouches in this war. As Jeffrey knew painfully well, American subs could be sunk in battle. And just as the U.S. had done more than once to derelict Soviet submarines, Axis salvage divers or robotic probes could rifle through Challenger’s wreckage if something went wrong, compromising crucial codes and revealing priceless secrets.

  Jeffrey very carefully entered the combination on the big envelope’s keypad, to disarm the self-destruct. The last thing he wanted was to set it off by accident. Aside from ruining his orders before he could read them, fire on a submerged submarine would be terrible. None was ever considered small until after it was out. When the ship was prevented, because of the need for perpetual stealth, from surfacing or snorkeling to clear the smoke, at best the crew would have to spend long hours in uncomfortable respirator masks, until the air scrubbers removed the toxins and soot. At worst, men would die. No, Jeffrey did not want to further mar this voyage by starting a fire.

  The envelope opened safely. Jeffrey emptied its contents on his desk. His heart began to pound.

  Among the papers and data disks, and another, inner, sealed envelope, were two metal uniform-collar insignia— silver eagles, which meant the rank of Captain, United States Navy, the next rank above commander. The actual rank of captain, not just the courtesy title that every vessel’s skipper received. Jeffrey snatched up the hard copy orders and read them as fast as he could, almost desperately.

  He realized his mind had been playing nasty tricks, in the vacuum of feedback from above, running toward paranoia that was probably a symptom of his own lingering reactions to his drastic decisions and their traumatic effects in the Med.

  Challenger had indeed been ordered to mask her presence at Pearl Harbor because of security. The trip to the U.S. East Coast was a cover story. His five mysterious passengers belonged to a Seabee Engineer Reconnaissance Team; SERTs were elite shadow warriors from among the Navy’s mobile combat construction battalions. They gathered unusual intell and did mind-boggling tasks at the forward edge of the battle area. Interesting.

  Jeffrey was hereby promoted to the rank of Navy captain — the rank immediately below rear admiral. He was also awarded a second Medal of Honor for what he’d done in the Med, though this award was classified. There’d be no bright gold star, for the blue ribbon with small white stars already adorning his dressier uniforms, to denote the second Medal. But selection boards for rear admiral, Jeffrey reminded himself, would certainly know about it when the time came. Plus, Challenger’s whole crew had been awarded another Presidential Unit Citation, although this was also top secret outside the ship.

  Good. Excellent. Morale will skyrocket.

  He skimmed more. Once through the Bering Strait, gateway to the Chukchi Sea, he still would turn toward Canada. Then, in the ice-choked, storm tossed Beaufort Sea, above the Arctic Circle, Challenger would rendezvous with USS Jimmy Carter. Carter was an ultra-fast and deep diving steelhulled sub of the Seawolf class, uniquely modified with an extra hundred feet of hull length — room to support large special operations forces commando raids, plus “garage space” for oversized weapons and off-board probes.

  Bell was being promoted to full commander. He’d take over Challenger from Jeffrey, who from now on was commanding officer of an undersea strike group consisting of Challenger and Carter; Bell and Carter’s captain would be his subordinates. To avoid confusion between all these different roles and ranks, Jeffrey was granted the courtesy title of commodore.

  He was positively delighted. Whatever he’d done, good or bad, his supporters in upper Navy echelons — and the White House too? — outweighed and overruled his detractors. He wasn’t being banished after all. Jeffrey read further into his orders, more slowly now to absorb every detail. Crucial portions of the mission required that two submarines be involved, but there was much more to it than Challenger and Carter together having more total firepower, while covering each other’s back. This piqued Jeffrey’s curiosity; no explanation was given of what it meant. Even more cryptically, Jeffrey was told to brush up on the Russian he’d studied in college, and to practice his poker face; the SERT guys would help him on both counts, starting right away. His eyebrows rose, involuntarily, as he took this in.

  After the rendezvous and a joint briefing to be held aboard Carter, he would lead his two-ship strike group westward, into the East Siberian Sea — Russian home waters. His assignment was to do something that would force Russia once and for all to stop supporting the Axis against America while Moscow outwardly kept claiming legal neutrality. Specifics were inside that inner envelope, to be opened only once the rendezvous was made.

  Jeffrey’s entire demeanor changed. This was exactly the sort of important and dangerous undertaking he really enjoyed; revealing the whole plan only in stages, for security, was something he’d gotten used to. He couldn’t wait to tell Bell the great news about their twinned promotions. Jeffrey was fond of Navy traditions and pomp; he’d been so, almost obsessively, since discovering naval history in a local St. Louis library as a child. He was impatient to hold the formal change of command ceremony, in the enlisted mess — the biggest meeting space on his ship. No. Correct that. On Captain Bell’s ship.

  One thing puzzled, disturbed Jeffrey. For this mission, he came under the control of Commander, Strategic Command, a U.S. Air Force four-star general. That general oversaw the readiness and possible use of America’s thermonuclear weapons — hydrogen bombs. Challenger carried no H-bombs, and never had. Her nuclear torpedoes bore very low yields, a single kiloton maximum. H-bombs had destructive power a thousand times as large, and vastly greater deadly radioactive fallout that drifted globally.

  The Axis, shrewdly, owned no hydrogen bombs and made sure the whole world knew it. This kept America from escalating past tactical atomic fission devices set off only at sea— not that anyone sane in the U.S. would want to further escalate this war.

  Jeffrey began to suffer a dreadful unease. Why am I suddenly reporting to Commander, Strategic Command?

  Glossary

  Acoustic intercept: A passive (listening only) sonar specifically designed to give warning when the submarine is “pinged” by an enemy active sonar. The latest version is the WLY-1.

  Active out-of-phase emissions: A way to weaken the echo that an enemy sonar receives from a submarine’s hull, by actively emitting sound waves of the same frequency as the ping but exactly out of phase. The out-of-phase sound waves mix with and cancel those of the echoing ping.

  ADCAP: Mark 48 Advanced Capability torpedo. A heavyweight, wire-guided, long-range torpedo used by American nuclear submarines. The Improved ADCAP has an even longer range, and an enhanced (and extremely capable) target-homing sonar and software logic package.

  AIP: Air Independent Propulsion. Refers to modern diesel submarines that have an additional power source besides the standard diesel engines and electric storage batteries. The AIP system allows quiet and long-endurance submerged cruising, without the need to snorkel for air, because oxygen and fuel are carried aboard the vessel in special tanks. For example, the German class 212 design uses fuel cells for air-independent propulsion.

  Ambient sonar: A form of active sonar that uses, instead of a submarine’s pinging, the ambient noise of the surrounding ocean to catch reflections off a target. Noise sources can include surface wave-action sounds, the propulsion plants of other vessels (such as passing neutral merchant shipping), or biologics (sea life). Ambient sonar gives the advantage of actively pinging but without betraying a submarine’s own presence. Advanced signal-processing algorithms and powerful onboard computers are needed to exploi
t ambient sonar effectively.

  Auxiliary maneuvering units: Small propulsors at the bow and stern of a nuclear submarine, used to greatly enhance the vessel’s maneuverability. First ordered for the USS Jimmy Carter, the third and last of the Seawolf-class SSNs (nuclear fast-attack submarines) to be constructed.

  Ceramic composite: A multilayered composite foam matrix made from ceramic and metallic ingredients. One formulation, called alumina casing, an extremely strong submarine hull material significantly less dense than steel, was declassified by the U.S. Navy after the Cold War.

  Corvette: A type of oceangoing warship smaller than a frigate (see below).

  Deep scattering layer: A diffuse layer of biologics (marine life) present in many parts of the world’s oceans, which causes scattering and absorption of sound. This can have tactical significance for undersea warfare forces by obscuring passive sonar contacts and causing false active sonar target returns. The layer’s local depth, thickness, and scattering strength are known to vary by many factors, including one’s location on the globe, the sound frequency being observed, the season of the year, and the hour of the day. The deep scattering layer is typically several hundred feet thick, and lies somewhere between one thousand and two thousand feet of depth during daylight, migrating shallower at night.

  Double agent: A spy who works for both sides in a conflict. Often one side believes the spy works exclusively for them, when in fact the spy’s loyalty is to the enemy, or only to him- or herself. Double agents in your employ can thus provide valuable information about the other side’s intelligence operations. But they might instead (or simultaneously) represent a serious threat to your security by providing good information about you to the other side, or by intentionally misleading your side with false but plausible information.